


The Pottery Lamp

by Jay Tryfanstone (tryfanstone)



Category: SUTCLIFF Rosemary - Works, The Witch's Brat - Rosemary Sutcliff
Genre: Gen, Herb Garden, Medieval England, The Exchange at Fic Corner 2017, The Exchange at Fic Corner 2017 Treat, monastic life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-14 22:55:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11793198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/pseuds/Jay%20Tryfanstone
Summary: In the morning he had lifted the turf, where the new herb bed was to lie, and over the day, after the servant's Mass, he had broken up the packed soil underneath.





	The Pottery Lamp

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Greer Watson (greerwatson)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greerwatson/gifts).



It was one of those evenings between summer and autumn, drowsily warm and gently damp, and the air was full of the smell of growing things. The drift of strawberries under the elders was busy sending tiny green runners through the wattle of the raised bed, and the apple trees were so heavy with fruit that there were windfalls to spare for the bees. All the foxgloves had died back, but the tall spikes of lupin guarded the wall, and above them the honeysuckle was beginning to scent the evening. The bells had rung for Vespers, so that the low murmur of the Monastery was one of prayer, and neither the recitation of the novices nor the sharp bustle of Brother Eustace in the infirmary disturbed the garden. 

Lovel was alone. 

In the morning he had lifted the turf, where the new herb bed was to lie, and over the day, after the servant's Mass, he had broken up the packed soil underneath. When the bells had called for Terce, Harding had come whistling into the physic garden with a barrow full of manure, and behind him had come the hound Valiant and her charges, the two small ginger-striped kittens Valiant had found in the stables and refused to believe were actually cats. The kittens had taken the trellis of the wall as their own playground, which meant poor Valiant had spent the afternoon braced at its base, staring upwards with a wrinkle between her eyes and the occasional whine, until in the way of young animals the kittens had tumbled onto the grass and fallen asleep and the hound could relax. Harding had helped out with turning the soil, his sleeves rolled up and his cap pulled low on his face against the sun, until there had come a clatter of hooves from the gateway and a shout from the courtyard. It had been early in the day for guests, but the King and his court were in residence at the palace, and that meant visitors for the Abbot and extra work for the Monastery servants. 

"Best be off, then," Harding said, but he cleaned off his hoe and tipped out the last of the manure, before whistling to Valiant and leaving for the stables at a stubborn saunter. 

There was little enough left to do, then, and Lovel took his time over it, breaking up the clay of the soil and packing it deep with the manure. In spring, after the frosts had broken it down, he would seed the bed with comfrey and mint, the strong-stemmed spearmint of the hedgerows and the sweet-scented apple mint Brother John dried for headache powders and tisanes. He would transplant the thyme, and the chives. There would be a border of marigolds against the slugs, and at the back the tall, hairy stems of blue borage, good for salads and shortness of breath. Lovel had the image of it as clear as the painting in a book, all miniature jewel-bright leaves and flowers, as he dug and hoed and forked over the heavy clods. There would be a small wattle fence, banked up against the soil, for drainage, and to make the weeding easier, and if he potted the thyme before he put in the ground it would not spread to take over the whole bed....

It was only at None, when he was resting his hoe, that he realised he was planning for next year. The thought caught in his throat, for the Lovel of last year, the Lovel waiting like Valiant at the wall for Rahere the King's Jongleur to crook his finger, or the Lovel of the year before, who had nothing but the tasks he was told to do, would not have stood in the physic garden and planned for next year. The Monastery had folded itself around him before he had realised, serene and ageless, and like Father Anselm or Father John, he had become a part of the whole as well as himself. 

Maybe, he thought, it would not be so hard to take the robe, if in doing so he was affirming his place in the great wheel of the work of the Monastery. And yet - he did not have Brother Eustace's simple faith, or the Abbot's silent intensity, or Brother John's pragmatic, terse prayers. To him, their faith was a mystery, and God - Lovel was not very sure about God at all. Gardens, one could be sure of. God was a different matter altogether. And perhaps, one day, Rahere would whistle for him....

He bent again to his hoe. The soil next to the wall was shadowed and damp and cool, easier to turn over and break down, speckled with white lime from the flaking plaster above. There were other things, too, for this wall was, Lovel thought, older than the rest of the garden walls, the bricks long and flat and rounded, and possibly older than the Monastery itself, and in its long lifetime many things had been discarded at the foundations. There was a scrap of leather, and a couple of empty snail shells and some cut bones, and further down broad, flat fragments of roof tile and a few shards of pottery that were thin and fine and grey and not at all like the thick earthenware of the Monastery's bowls. The hoe chimed when it hit stone, the little shock of impact running up the shaft into Lovel's hand, but when it hit tile there was a duller, softer noise, and soon every stroke he made was shortened. He laid the hoe aside and dug into the soil with his hands, piling up the tile fragments to one side, and he was trying to lever one particularly large piece out of the way when the soil above it crumbled and a pottery shard the size of a crab apple fell into the hole. Lovel would have discarded it like all the others, but in the falling the soil had crumbled away from the clay, and there was a glint of red underneath, a clay that was the shiny red of a russet apple and not the dull terracotta of the tiles. He reached for it.

It was a small, flat thing, so that he could hold it in the palm of his hand, the pottery lighter and warmer than a stone would be, and as he crumbled away the dirt he found a bevelled edge, and then a spout, and then a handle. When he took a twig from under the apple trees and dug away at the spout, he found the centre of it was hollow, but that there was a tiny incised stamp on its underside with letters that were straight-edged, nothing like the rounded curves of Brother Anselm's scribing. He puzzled over the thing, turning it backwards and forwards in his hand, the shape of it familiar and not familiar, until in a horrible rush he bethought himself of the stuffy little room at the old Manor where the Bailiff had told Gyrth's wife that she must take in a wise woman's misshapen grandson. There had been a lamp just the same as this one burning on the bench, with a rush wick, so that the smell of tallow had clung to the air. That lamp had been crude clay. This one was a finely moulded and friendly bright red, with a glaze that gleamed gently in the evening sun, so that it seemed to carry the promise of both light and cheer. 

There were footsteps outside the garden, the hurried flap of sandals that portended one of the monks. Lovell slipped the lamp into his sleeve, and reached for his hoe, but when Brother John ducked through into the garden he was not there to inspect the new herb bed. He was a little flushed, and his habit was caught up at his belt, as if he had been hurrying. 

"Quickly, now," Brother John said. "The Abbot has sent for you." Then he looked at Lovel's knees, which were red and encrusted with dirt and grass, and his hands, which were streaked with damp soil, and his mouth went very flat indeed.

There was time, it seemed, for Brother John to take a horse brush to his skin at the water trough before Lovel must race across the courtyard and up the stairs towards the Abbot's lodging, and then stop at the top of the stairs to catch his breath, so that he not be red-faced and panting before the Abbot himself. There, someone had tracked mud across the smooth stone of the passageway, so that it was drying in little clods and smears. Lovel nearly turned on his heel to fetch a broom before the Abbot noticed, when he remembered that it was not himself but the boy Norris, now, who ran errands around the Monastery, and that the Abbot was waiting. 

In the passage to the Abbot's own guest quarters, the windows were glass and seldom shuttered, so that the sunset was a splintered glitter through diamond panes, and the walls were sheathed in tapestries, and as he walked the stitched silk eyes of courtiers and hunting parties in great forests stared down at him. There was a great velvet curtain across the door to the guest chamber, all reds and golds, and he had to shoulder through it, although the door beyond was set ajar.

Inside, the fire was lit, although the evening was not cold, and there was a cloth over the table and on it pewter dishes with apricots and figs, a bowl of white bread and a slab of butter, and the picked-over bones of a goose. There was a silver flagon, still dewed from the ice house, although the wineglasses were pewter and not the fragile yellowed glass that the Abbot used for his noblest guests. There was a man in a leather jerkin in the guest-chair, and a blond boy next to him, picking at a fig with the point of his knife. For a moment, Lovel could not see the Abbot, and then realised he was standing by the window, the long lines of his black robe as straight and stern as the stonework, and his eyes dark as a crow's and fixed on Lovel.

"My lord?" Lovel said. "You called for me?"

"Well," said the man at the table. "The brat has hardly grown straighter."

Everything in Lovel flinched. It was not that he had forgotten he was crooked, but that within the walls of the Monastery there seemed less and less reason to take account of it. His hunchback had not stopped him setting Valiant's broken leg, nor grinding Brother John's powders: his lame leg had not hindered him in learning to read, and it was a long time since anyone had called him anything but boy, or, now, Lovel. He had not known how much he minded, but the matter-of-fact care of the Monastery had sanded away his protections, and the words bruised.

"No," said the Abbot. 

He had not moved, but it seemed to Lovel that the Abbot grew even taller and straighter. His face was all narrow lines, and his great hooked nose looked as powerful as an eagle's beak.

"You are sure this is the boy?" demanded the man at the table.

The man at the table was still wearing his riding boots. The trimming on his tabard was loose, and hung frayed, and there were stains on his fingers and crumbs in his grey beard. Lovel, who had served the King's Jongleur, found his hands steadying. 

"Yes," said the Abbot. 

"You claim he can read," said the man at the table, sneering.

"I am not in the habit of lying, Richard," said the Abbot.

It was then that Lovel realised, in a horrible, swooping rush, that the Abbot was as coldly angry as a monk could be, and that the man at the table was his old liege lord. The man who had owned Lovel himself, and his dead parents, and his dead grandmother, and the village where they had lived before Lovel had been driven away. Sir Richard had never, he thought, even known his name.

"He is a serf," said Sir Richard, and although he was staring at Lovel it was as if he did not see him at all. "Serfs do not read."

"By your own word you ceded Lovel to the Monastery," said the Abbot. "And by my count he has been here two years and nigh on three. He can read."

"Surely it is not so long," said Sir Richard, frowning.

The fire was leaping in the grate, the big apple logs of the Abbot's fire, the flames pale and the smoke fragrant, but Lovel was cold from the tips of his fingers to the top of his head. He had been Sir Richard's from the moment he was born, but he did not want to go back to the village where every other serf had despised and feared him for his crookedness, and his plant-lore, and his grandmother's wisdom. He hunched his shoulders and thrust his hands into the sleeves of his robe, where he found a snatch of cloth for wiping his nose and the little pottery lamp, just the right size to clench comfortably in his fingers. He clung to it, and although the chamber seemed darker to him, he felt he held the promise of light.

"Lovel has been welcome here longer than a year and a day," said the Abbot, very gently, so that only if one was listening hard could one hear the steel in his voice under the velvet.

"Papa, must we?" said the blond boy. His voice was thin and high. "Should I have to look at a lame bailiff every day of the year, and a carping churchman besides?"

Sir Richard did not spare his son a glance, and neither did Lovel. He was looking at the Abbot, and the Abbot was looking back at him, and although he was very sure his own face did not change and the Abbot was as still as stone his heart had grown wings and was beating against his ribs. He was - he was a free man, with or without Sir Richard's word, for Lovel had been outwith the bounds of his village for longer than a year and a day and the King's law stated said that any man who so did, and was not caught, was a free man. 

"Well?" said Sir Richard, tapping his knife on the table. "Well, brat, it looks as if I have a use for you after all. I find myself in need of a bailiff, and soon, and one that can read. It is a good post, and there is a cottage in it for you, and a cow, better than anything you would find here. We must leave tonight, so if there is anything you must bring-"

"It is Lovel's own choice," said the Abbot.

"By that head of hair, he is not a churchman yet," snapped Sir Richard.

"Nevertheless, he is ours," said the Abbot. "And therefore his choice is his own. Lovell, what do you wish?"

Lovel loosened his fingers around the lamp. He would, he thought, give it to Brother Anselm, to set above his desk on the shelf where he kept his sharpening knives and his pumice stone, so that when evening came the old monk could read a little longer. It would be a light in darkness, as the Monastery and its monks had been to Lovel himself. 

"No," said Lovel. "No. I will not go." He had his chin up, and his back as straight as it would go, and the words came out almost as firm as he would have wished, a man's words, for all his voice had not yet settled. 

Sir Richard, flushing, was as pink as a boiled ham. "What!" he said. "What - how dare you-"

"Lovel has made his decision," said the Abbot.

For the first time there was the trace of a smile on the Abbot's face. He was walking forward, so that his robe swung out around him like a knight's cloak, sending his shadow flickering across the room, and Lovel remembered that it was said the Abbot had been a swordsman before he was a man of God, and had fought at the king's right hand. Yet it was not fear that caught at his belly: it was a fierce and unexpected joy, and he found he could meet the Abbot's swift smile with his own. He could not see Sir Richard behind the Abbot's broad shoulders. 

"Good lad, Lovel," the Abbot said, very soft, and set a hand on his shoulder, and sent him, very gently, through the door and under the curtain and out, into the wide freedom of the passageway. 

The sun had set, and the stars were out, twinkling through the panes of glass. Lovel hitched up his robe, unexpectedly light-footed on the stone, and went home to his own small cell.


End file.
